Mark Haddon - The Pier Falls - And Other Stories

“Don’t be silly.” Carol shows her the papier-mâché giraffe. “Look.”

“This is definitely someone else’s house.” She seems very calm for someone in such a disconcerting situation.

Robyn steps round her mother and into the room. “What did you do, Carol?”

“I cleaned and tidied.”

“This is her home, Carol. For fuck’s sake.”

“You can’t make me stay here,” says her mother.

“Mum…” Carol blocks her way. “Look at the curtains. You must remember the curtains. Look at the sideboard. Look at the picture.”

“Let me go.” Her mother pushes her aside and runs.

Robyn says, “Are you happy now?”

Carol can’t think of an answer. She’s lost confidence in the rightness of her actions and opinions. She feels seasick.

“I hope you have nightmares about this,” says Robyn, then she turns and leaves.

She drives to the off-licence and returns with a bottle of vodka and a half-litre of tonic water. She pours herself a big glass and sits in front of the television, scrolling through the channels in search of programmes from her childhood. She finds The Waltons . She finds Gunsmoke . She watches for two hours then rings Robyn.

“I don’t think I want to talk to you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No you’re not, Carol. I don’t think you know the meaning of the word.”

It strikes her that this might be true. “Where’s Mum?”

“Back on the ward. They still had a bed, thank God.”

“And what’s going to happen to her?”

“You mean, what am I going to do now that you’ve smashed her life to pieces?”

Was it really possible to destroy someone’s life by giving them a bath and cleaning their house? Could a life really be held together by dirt and disorder?

“Have you been drinking?”

She can’t think of a reply. Perhaps she really is drunk. The line goes dead.

She returns to the television. Columbo, Friends . It is dark outside now and being drunk isn’t having the anaesthetic effect she hoped. She watches a documentary about the jungles of Madagascar. She sleeps and wakes and sleeps and wakes and somewhere in between the two states it becomes clear how much she loved Aysha, how much she still loves her, and how it is the strength of those feelings which terrifies her. Then she sleeps and wakes again and it is no longer clear.

She comes round with a grinding headache and sour sunlight pouring through the gap in the curtains. She rifles through the kitchen drawers and finds some antique ibuprofen and washes down two tablets with tonic water. She remembers how the cleaning and tidying of yesterday calmed her mind. So she takes a collection of planks from the broken bed in front of the house and stacks them in the centre of the lawn at the back, then breaks the rusty padlock from the shed door with a chunk of paving stone. Inside, everything is exactly as her father left it, concertinas of clay pots, jars of nails and screws, balls of twine, envelopes of seeds (Stupice early vine tomatoes, Lisse de Meaux carrots…), a fork, a spade…The lighter fuel is sitting in a little yellow can on the top shelf. She sprinkles it on the pyramid of wood and sets it alight. When it is blazing she drags the mattress outside and folds it over the flames. Through a gap in the fence a tiny woman in a pink shalwar kameez and headscarf is watching her, but when Carol catches her eye she melts away. There were twins there once, two scrawny boys with some developmental problem. Donny and Cameron, was it? Their mother worked in the Co-op.

The mattress catches. The smell is tart and chemical, the smoke thick and black. She takes the sofa cushions outside and adds them to the pyre. Then, one by one, the dining chairs. She hasn’t been this close to big unguarded flames since she was a child. She’s forgotten how thrilling it is. And out of nowhere she remembers. It was the one public-spirited thing her father did, building and watching over the estate’s bonfire in the run-up to Guy Fawkes Night. Perhaps being an outsider was a part of it. Ferrymen, rat catchers and executioners, intermediaries between here and the other place. Or perhaps her father was simply scary enough to stop the more wayward kids starting the celebrations with a can of petrol in mid-October. She remembers how he drove out to the woods behind the car plant and brought back a bag of earth from the mouth of a fox’s den then built the fire round it so that the scent would keep hedgehogs and cats and mice from making a home inside. It is a tenderness she can’t remember him ever showing to another human being.

She goes back inside the house. Someone is knocking at the front door. Then they are knocking on the front window. Shaved head, Arsenal shirt. “You’re a fucking headcase, you are. I’m calling the council.”

She burns the poster, the glass shattering in the heat. She hasn’t sweated like this in a long time. It feels good. She burns the ornaments and the knick-knacks and the bundles of newspapers. She stares into the heart of the fire as light drains slowly from the sky.

It starts to rain so she goes indoors. She rips up the carpet and the tack strips just like she’s done upstairs. She cuts the carpet into squares and throws them into the garden. The black wreckage of the bonfire steams and smokes. She sweeps and hoovers the floorboards. The TV and the curtains are the only remaining objects in the room.

She is too tired to do any more work but she is frightened of silence. She makes herself a large vodka and tonic. She sits with her back against the wall and scrolls through the channels until she finds a band of white noise in the mid-eighties. She turns the volume up so that the room is filled with grey light and white noise. She lies down and closes her eyes.

The phone is ringing. She has no idea what time it is. She lies motionless just inside the border of sleep, like a small animal in long grass waiting for the circling hawk to ride a thermal to some new pasture. The phone stops.

She dreams that she is a little girl standing in the stone circle. She dreams that she is flying over mountains. She dreams that she is looking down into a pit containing a dragon. She hears someone saying, over and over, “The fire, the clock and the candle,” but she doesn’t know what it means.

“Carol…?”

She opens her eyes and sees that dawn is coming up.

“Carol…?”

The TV screen fizzes on the far side of the room. Her hip and shoulder hurt where they were pressed against the hard, wooden floor. Why does the person calling her name not come through to the living room to find her? She gets slowly to her feet, flexing her stiff joints. She squats for a few seconds until the room stops swaying.

“Carol…?”

She thinks about slipping out the back door but it seems important that she doesn’t run away. Has she perhaps run away on a previous occasion with dire consequences? She can’t remember. Steadying herself with a hand on the wall she steps into the hall but sees only two blank rectangles of frosted daylight hanging in the gloom.

“Carol…?”